


Porcelain

by The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AUish, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Eventual Sherlock/John - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Scars, facial scarring, not strictly linear narritave
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 14:39:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3732634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting/pseuds/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock was born, his skin was pale and smooth, the barest blush of damask on his cheeks. It was a shame that that pristine, unbroken skin only lasted eight years. </p><p>~</p><p>Not always strictly linear scenes from the life of Sherlock Holmes after a childhood accident marks him as different physically as well as mentally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Porcelain

**Author's Note:**

> So this was a rather cruel 'what if' of an idea that just wouldn't leave me alone. As you can tell, given the length of this, and it's only half way done. I had planned to post this all as one complete fic, but after seeing how long it was getting, I thought two long chapters would be better. 
> 
> Please heed the warnings, this is not a happy fic, especially not this half. God maybe one of these days I will be able to write a fic without the heavy side order of angst.

When Sherlock was born, his skin was pale and smooth, the barest blush of damask on his cheeks. He had been near silent too, only crying once or twice, just to inform the world that he was there. He was so pale and so quiet in fact that that the midwives fretted, concerned he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He was placed in an incubator for the first few tense hours of his life, until they were sure that his pallor was natural, and perfectly healthy. 

As Mrs Holmes held her newborn son that night, she could hardly believe that two brothers could be so different. When Mycroft had been born he had been bright red in the face and screaming fit to burst for hours. Although Sherlock would cry an awful lot over the weeks and months to come, as though making up for lost time, for that first little while he was hushed and serene. He lay in his mother’s arms, only just whimpering when he was hungry. She did not love either son more or less than the other, but she merely wondered in their differences. 

Exhausted though she was, Violet Holmes stayed awake as long as she possibly could just to stare at her baby boy. She stroked one fingertip over his cheek and kissed his forehead. He stared back at her, already observing the world around him with the palest blue eyes. 

Like a doll, his mother thought. She would not be the last to make such a comparison. Even the next day, when nurses made their rounds, they would pay special attention to Sherlock, clucking over him and echoing those words back to Violet. 

“He’s like a little china doll,” they’d say. “Absolutely flawless.”

It was only Mycroft who declared his new baby brother was ‘distinctly weird looking’. But, after having a look at some of the other babies on the ward he announced just as loudly that Sherlock was by far the best, not nearly as ugly as some. He sat on the foot of his mother’s bed waiting for the baby to be passed to him, and refused to let anyone else hold him for the next hour. 

As their parents looked on and chuckled fondly, Mycroft touched Sherlock’s face as though he couldn’t quite believe his brother was real. 

It was a shame that that pristine, unbroken skin only lasted eight years. 

~

A great number of people would blame themselves for what happened to Sherlock. 

His teachers would blame themselves for not being more observant. At lunchtime, instead of playing with the other children, Sherlock had snuck out of the junior school playground, into the senior school buildings completely unnoticed. He knew the way, having been there once when Mycroft needed to drop of an extended piece of homework after school. He snuck past the library, where even at that moment the elder Holmes brother sat studying, and made his way to a vacant science lab. 

An hour later when a teacher had walked in to prepare for his next class it was to find Sherlock, alone, midway through a complicated experiment that involved a Bunsen burner and a bottle of acid so strong that only sixth form students were permitted to use it under strict supervision. The look of joint rage and horror on the man’s face was funny enough to make Sherlock giggle. That was before the anger won out and the teacher began near screaming at Sherlock. 

He kept asking, yelling, questions at Sherlock. What on earth was he thinking? Did he know how many rules he was breaking right now? Didn’t he care for his own safety at all?

Sherlock knew these questions were rhetorical, but still he did his best to answer them. He tried to explain the experiment he was doing. He tried to assure the furious teacher that he knew just what he was doing, was copying a perfectly sound demonstration he had seen on TV, and had in fact taken all the proper safety precautions. He was still wearing one safety glove when the teacher finally yelled himself horse and dragged Sherlock away to the head teacher’s office. 

It was much the same there, only now the headmaster added that Sherlock would be excluded for the remainder of that week and next and if this ever happened again he would have no choice but to consider expulsion. Sherlock’s parents were called to collect him and the story was relayed to them. Again what Sherlock considered to be the key facts of the story – that Sherlock had been adhering to the utmost safety, and that he had been successfully replicating an experiment way beyond the comprehension of not just most students in the school, but most undergraduate students at university too. He did voice the possibility that it was perhaps that just his teachers didn’t understand and that he’d be happy to explain the experiment in full detail to them. Sherlock considered that to be a perfectly reasonable offer and couldn’t understand why it only increased the fury aimed at him. 

At some point Mycroft turned up, having had a free session and hearing that his little brother was at the centre of yet another commotion. He joined his parents and headmaster in the office just to add his own thoughts on the matter. 

By the time he was taken home, Sherlock felt as though he had been shouted at by every adult in the world. 

Everyone was so fixated on admonishing Sherlock that no one bothered to check his school bag, or indeed, the supplies in the lab he had been frequenting. And so no one noticed that several pieces of equipment including a bottle of that very same oh so dangerous acid that Sherlock had been working with, had gone missing. 

It is normal for any parent to blame themselves when something horrendous happens to one of their children. Mr and Mrs Holmes blamed themselves for being too harsh on Sherlock, for focussing on telling him again and again how many rules he had broken, not placing enough emphasis on the danger he had put himself in. They blamed themselves for not telling Sherlock how terrified they had been when they had been told that their baby boy had been caught playing with acid. Of course, Sherlock would have insisted he was not playing but experimenting, and nothing would have been achieved at all, but they blamed themselves all the same. They blamed themselves for being away on the day of the accident, as though their mere presence in the house could have averted the crisis. 

Mycroft blamed himself perhaps most of all. 

He was the only one in the house with Sherlock at the time. Both parents out with important errands to run, Mycroft had been left in charge and also granted uninterrupted access to his mother’s study so that he could work over a set of old entrance exams for Cambridge and Oxford. His own university application may have still been a couple of years away, but it was never too early to start practicing.

It was barely half an hour after his parents left that Mycroft head the study door creak open. 

“... My?” said a soft voice from behind him.

“What is it, Sherlock?” asked Mycroft without looking up. 

“My,” said that little voice again, a hint of whining now. Sighing, Mycroft put down his pen and turned to face Sherlock. The boy was still in his pyjamas. One hand rested on the door frame, the other was currently buried in Redbeard’s fur, the faithful dog as ever by his favourite human’s side. 

“What is it?” Mycroft asked again. “What do you want?” 

Sherlock just stared at him with pale, unblinking eyes for a few moments. 

“... Come play with us.” 

Mycroft sighed again with an added roll of the eyes this time. 

“Go away, Sherlock,” he said, already turning to dismiss the boy. Sherlock took a few defiant, silent steps into the room. 

“Please come and play.”

“No. I’m busy; I don’t have time to play,” Mycroft spat the word as though the whole notion was foreign to him. “Anyway, aren’t you still being punished? You’re not supposed to be out of your room while Mum and Dad aren’t here.” 

“But ‘m bored, My.”

“Good! That’s the whole point of a punishment. If you were having fun it wouldn’t exactly be working. Do your homework.”

“Did it all.” Sherlock pouted. “Me and Redbeard wanna play Pirates.”

“No, Sherlock,” said Mycroft, through gritted teeth. “Redbeard doesn’t want to play anything. He is a dog. Now go to your room like you’re supposed to, and leave me alone.” 

Sherlock remained in the doorway for a few moments, blinking up at his big brother. Mycroft was used to that intense stare, already a frequent target for Sherlock’s deductions. It had in fact been Mycroft who helped perfect those skills, finding the smaller boy a place to channel all that excess information that was constantly assaulting his senses. 

He’d tried to explain to Sherlock that other people didn’t always enjoy their private matters being announced to anyone within earshot. When Sherlock had said, near sobbing, that it was too hard, that his head would explode if he had to keep it all inside, Mycroft had said they could make a game of it. If Sherlock could keep all his deductions inside all day, then Mycroft would sit with him in the evenings and listen as Sherlock told him about them. 

But Mycroft was not in the mood for games that day, and his patience was already wearing thin. 

“Me and Redbeard are gonna play Pirates,” Sherlock announced suddenly, looking so solemn and determined it was almost comical. Mycroft didn’t laugh.

“No, you are not.” Mycroft got up from his chair and marched across the room to Sherlock. He grabbed the boy’s upper arm, half shoving him out of the office. “You are going to go to your room and be quiet. If I hear you out of your room again, I’ll tell Mummy how much you’ve been bothering me while I’m trying to study. Now go. To. Your. Room!” 

Sherlock blinked at his brother once more, taken aback by the way he had shouted. Mycroft had always been very much on Sherlock’s side in the past. He wasn’t used to being shouted at by his big brother and it hurt as though Mycroft had slapped him. He could feel stupid tears, more out of anger than hurt, filling his eyes.

Then, quite suddenly, Sherlock’s small shoulders hunched and without another word he turned and trailed back down the corridor towards his room, Redbeard trotting after him.

In years to come, Mycroft would replay that moment over and over again. He would long to have that time back again, so that he could call Sherlock back. He would apologise for shouting at him, tell him they could play Pirates, or Deductions, or any other game Sherlock chose. But in reality, he just waited until he heard Sherlock’s bedroom door close and then went back to his studies.

~

Sherlock was bored. Angry, and fed up and bored, bored, bored. He had finished all the set homework he had on the first day of his exclusion and what he could only call forced incarceration in his own room. Since then he had began to read ahead in his school text books – already way ahead of the rest of the class – but that had fast lost its appeal. There was no challenge to be had there and he wasn’t exactly inclined to do anything more that that wretched school wanted. He didn’t understand why everyone was acting as though he had done something terrible by trying that experiment. They should have all been proud of him for accomplishing what he had done before he was interrupted. 

Sherlock was tired of being treated like a child.

“Don’t worry, Redbeard,” said Sherlock, turning to the dog. Redbeard wasn’t technically allowed in Sherlock’s bedroom, and certainly wasn’t allowed on Sherlock’s bed, but no one was there to stop him and so that was where he had spread himself. Sherlock was pleased that his friend was joining him in an act of disobedience. “We’ll just finish up our experiment here instead.” 

So Sherlock gathered the equipment he had pilfered from the school supplies and set about recreating the experiment in his bedroom. He had been unable to sneak a pair of safety gloves, or goggles, but he knew what he was doing. The gloves just made him clumsy anyway. 

It was less than an hour later when Mycroft heard Sherlock screaming. 

~

“Your son has been very fortunate, Mrs Holmes.” 

Mrs Holmes had wanted to laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of those words. All that left her though was a dull croaking noise. Her throat felt raw from crying, but she couldn’t summon anymore tears just then, as though she had run dry. The doctor carried on, sensing her disbelief at his statement. 

“The damage has nearly exclusively been contained to the left side of his face. He must have been leaning right over his... experiment.... but turned his head away when the beaker exploded. Other than his face, the only other damage is to his left hand – he’d started to raise it to protect himself but it just caught some of the glass. Hardly any of the acid at all, and given time, we think he should regain the full use of it.” 

Violet nodded, to show she was listening, but she was not taking it in. Odd words kept jumping out at her, sticking like tar to the receptors of her brain. Damage. Acid. Time. She did not want it to take time to heal her baby. She wanted him whole again right away. But she could see that whole was something Sherlock was not likely to be again. 

The doctor continued listing the ways in which Sherlock was ‘fortunate’. 

“It is still too early to say for certain but... the injury to his face looks to be severe. Severe acid burn through several layers of skin, plus some fairly deep lacerations from the glass. It is highly unlikely that we will be able to avoid scarring, but again with time, and further surgery, skin grafts, you might be surprised at what we can achieve. We’ve managed to save the sight in his left eye. He may experience some disrupted vision from time to time,” Mrs Holmes groaned quietly again, “but with his right eye completely healthy, he should be able to see just fine. It’s a good thing that he was brought here so fast, and that he was treated to so well at the scene. There aren’t many fifteen year olds who would know what substance to apply to neutralise the reaction. You should be very proud of your elder son.”

Finally, Mrs Holmes could muster the ghost of a smile. 

“We are,” she assured the doctor. “Very proud.” 

“Where is he?”

“With his father... Mycroft is with his father.” Clearly this doctor didn’t know how badly Mycroft was already taking this, how he had to be sedated because of the hysteria he was in. Mr Holmes was sat with Mycroft in another room, telling him over and over again that this was not his fault, that he could not have stopped this from happening. The doctor placed a comforting hand on Mrs Holmes’ shoulder.

“You’ve got a very clever boy there, Mrs Holmes.” 

“Two. I-I’ve got two very clever boys.” 

All the time that the two adults were talking, Sherlock lay in his hospital bed, staring at the ceiling with what he now knew to be his good eye. His left eye was still covered with bandages. 

Like an eyepatch, he thought, like a pirate. He wondered briefly exactly which of the numbing veil of drugs currently enveloping his consciousness made that thought seem so funny he had to fight giggles. 

His hearing was unaffected though and so he listened to the diagnosis they would give to his mother, but not to him. When he heard his mother start crying again, finding fresh tears from somewhere, he closed his right eye too. 

None of this seemed ‘fortunate’ to Sherlock. 

~

If someone had asked an eight year old Sherlock to describe hell, the intensive and prolonged care unit of the children’s hospital was probably pretty close to it. There was not a single aspect of the place that did not join ranks like playground bullies to assault his senses. The walls, with their garish, primary coloured murals of rainbows and cartoon bears, so bright they continued to cavort across his vision even when his eyelids were closed. The sterile cleaner specially formulated for use on children’s wards to smell ‘homely’ and ‘comforting’ but somehow managed to smell more artificial and nauseating than anything else Sherlock was yet to encounter in his life and which still didn’t quite manage to mask the less pleasant aromas of vomit and medication and twenty or so cooped up children that permeated the room. Perhaps the compound elements of the smell were worked into the sheets along with over-starched cotton. 

All this was without taking into account the noise. The crying, laughing, shouting. Nobody seemed to just talk in this place, choosing instead to holler and shriek above the inevitable cacophony that ensues when children, from toddlers to preteens – any toddlers and preteens, let alone sick and injured ones – are placed in one room for too long. 

It was this room that Sherlock found his bed being wheeled into, once those first few critical stages of care were completed.

“I hate it here,” were the first words he said. Like a lot of things that Sherlock said, this went ignored as over worked doctors decided, with tenuous logic, that this was the ideal environment for Sherlock to recover in. 

~

Two days after ‘the accident’ as it was by then being referred to, a bandage change was scheduled. Sherlock’s least favourite nurse – an unshakeably cheerful woman who had a fondness for giving her young charges pet names and ruffling their hair – bustled over and began laying out clean dressings.

“Don’t worry, my petal,” she said. “We’ll soon have you all healed up and you’ll be running around again in no time.” So she was a liar, as well as an irritant. 

Preparations made, the nurse drew the screen curtains, designed to give patients some privacy, tightly around Sherlock’s bed. 

But Sherlock already knew there was no such thing as privacy here. There were too many small, bored children for that to be the case, and too few nurses to watch them. Sure enough, they were less than half way through when a small face appeared between a gap in the curtains, gawping at the new entertainment. Instead of alerting the nurse to the intrusion happening behind her back, Sherlock met the boy’s gaze with his one available eye. The boy was from two beds down, name of Charlie, if Sherlock remembered correctly. Five years old. Sherlock was yet to learn his diagnosis, or any solid facts about his personality or traits, but the very fact he was present on this ward meant he was less inclined to be squeamish than most his age. 

The boy watched Sherlock with the same way he might a cartoon. Sherlock watched Charlie watching him right up until the last bandage was removed, and the nurse stepped back. Sherlock studied the boy’s facial expression as it changed from one of fascination to terror. Then the crying started. 

The nurse whirled around, letting out a shriek of her own. 

“Charlie! What on earth are you doing in here?” She hurried over and tried to shoo the small child away from Sherlock’s bedside and shield his view at the same time. More nurses appeared and hustled the still crying Charlie back from the curtains before any irreparable damage could be done on either end. But it was already a little late for that. 

The privacy curtains proved to be neither private nor soundproof as they were hastily drawn once more and Sherlock listened perfectly well to what was unfolding beyond them. 

“Charlie, please calm down. You need to stop crying now, please. 

“But what’s wrong with him?” Charlie wailed into the now otherwise hushed children’s ward. “He’s melting!” 

Soon after that, Sherlock was assigned a therapist who encouraged him to look into a small, handheld mirror for a few minutes each time she visited. 

“It’s far better that we let him discover the extent of his injuries within a controlled environment,” she explained to Sherlock’s somewhat dubious parents. “We can’t hide the truth of his trauma from him.”

She may have had a point. But no matter what, Sherlock’s first accurate data about his new face would always have come from that sick, frightened little boy. 

~

Parents, for all their haste to reprimand children who knew no better, could be decidedly tactless themselves. Over those first few fragile days (and then again, repeatedly over the following weeks, months, years) Sherlock would discover this for himself. 

“Can’t that... poor boy be moved some where different?” Said within perfect earshot of Sherlock’s bed, his own mother going tense in the chair beside him. “He gives my Annabelle nightmares, you see.” 

~

It was highly uncommon for eight year olds to suffer such severe acid damage. This was a very good thing generally speaking, but not so much so for Sherlock. It meant that none of the doctor’s were sure of the best course of treatment for him. Treatments that had proved successful in adult cases were not suitable for his young, still growing body to take. Even some of the treatments which might have proved beneficial had to be scrapped early on.

One such procedure involved applying a thick, foul smelling cream to the burned area, in hopes of sterilising the area and drawing out any possibly infection at the same time as reducing scarring. This was suggested by a specialist doctor after he had some success with treating a similar type of burn on an adult patient’s foot. 

It seemed that applying the treatment to an eight-year-old’s face was far more painful than doing the same to an adult’s foot. Or at least, Sherlock was far more willing to express his pain than the previous patient had been. He screamed as the cream was being smoothed over his still raw burns. He cried, he shouted, he fought with the doctor and the nurses. Afterwards, he sat on his father’s lap, still sniffing and whimpering as they waited for the last of the cream to sink in. 

It didn’t take a very long conversation for his mother and father to decide not to proceed with that particular treatment any further. 

 

~

It took a full month, and Sherlock’s first of what would prove to be many, many, skin grafts, before Mycroft made it onto the ward. He had been to the hospital before with his parents, but had never made it past the general waiting room. He could not face what lay beyond the looming ward doors, choosing instead to spend the hours his parents were at his brother’s bedside reading out of date magazines about parenthood or home interiors, turning the torn pages with shaking hands. Perhaps it was the knowledge that Sherlock was still soundly unconscious that finally gave Mycroft the push to take those final few steps.

He stood and watched his brother sleeping off the anaesthetic. Mycroft had himself been prescribed sleeping tablets by the family GP; they were to help combat the nightmares he was now having. But the entire course of those sedatives would not equal the drug slowly leaving Sherlock’s system.

Mycroft held the fingertips of Sherlock’s damaged hand the way Sherlock had held Mycroft’s thumb in his entire fist as a baby. It was then that Mycroft made the silent promise that he would later turn in to his life’s work. If Mycroft’s skills, his knowledge and his abilities – all truly exemplary as endorsed by teachers, friends and strangers alike – if any of it was to have any purpose, it would be to protect Sherlock in any way he could. 

He would spend the rest of his days looking over Sherlock. It would become his obsession and vocation in one. He had already let Sherlock down once; he did not intend to do so again. 

For Sherlock’s part, he never once blamed Mycroft for what happened. For all the faults he so loved pointing out in his brother, that was not one of them. He did, in darker moments, go so far as to point out that Mycroft’s mission was one doomed to fail from the start.

The very thing he was trying to protect Sherlock from had already happened. 

~

“You’re cheating!” Sherlock declared, as Mycroft set off the buzzer for the fourth time in a row. 

The game had been a gift from Mycroft to Sherlock. One that the head nurse of the ward had been less than ecstatic about. 

“Do you really think this is appropriate?” she had asked slowly, smiling. Mycroft did not appreciate being spoken to as though he was one of the young children the woman was clearly used to communicating with. He replied that he thought a game was highly appropriate. 

“But this game?” she had pressed on. “Really, sweetie? Your brother is having enough operations as it is. Do you really think he’ll think this is a fun game to play?”

But Sherlock’s doctor, passing by on ward rounds had been thrilled. Not only would this be an excellent way to distract a clearly bored child seeking stimulation, but this particular game could be beneficial to his recovery. It would work with the physiotherapy Sherlock was receiving, to help him regain full mobility and motor skills in his left hand.

But at this accusation from his brother, Mycroft started to wonder if perhaps both himself and the doctor had been wrong. 

“How exactly is it possible for me to be cheating?” asked Mycroft. “I just lost my turn. Again.” 

“Exactly!” 

“How is that ch—”

“You’re deliberately setting it off to let me win.” Sherlock glared at him with such anger that he might have just as well announced Mycroft was deliberately spitting in his morning orange juice.

“I’m really not.” Mycroft tried to placate his brother. 

“Please,” Sherlock scoffed, sounding years older than he was. “A blind chimp could do better than me with this deformed excuse for a hand.”

Mycroft winced.

“Your hand is not deformed. And I am not letting you win. Besides, even if I was that’s nothing to get angry about.” 

Far from calming his brother, Mycroft’s words seemed to drive Sherlock wild. 

“Since when have you ever let me win anything?” he yelled. “Not since I was a baby. Just because of this,” Sherlock gestured with his hand again, “And this,” he gestured at his face, “you treat me differently. Well I don’t want pity, certainly not from you. And I don’t want to play your stupid game anymore!” And with that, Sherlock knocked the game board to the floor, scattering the pieces, before turning on his side and curling up into the tightest ball he could manage. 

Emotional outbursts were not uncommon on the ward. There was a lull in general background chatter. A few of the visiting parents gave Mycroft sympathetic looks and one of the nurses came over to help but he waved her away. 

Mycroft retrieved the game board from the floor and inspected it. A small dent in the casing, but other than that it was undamaged. Perfectly usable. He then set about the much lengthier task of collecting the playing pieces. Sherlock’s hand, scarred and healing as it was, might have been lacking in dexterity, but he still had strength there; the Adam’s Apple, the Spare Ribs and the Broken Heart were scattered far across the room. 

He returned to his brother’s bedside and sat quietly for a minute, resetting the board. Sherlock didn’t offer to help, or speak, but after a while he unfurled his body and sat watching. Mycroft glanced up. The bandages were off for now, but his skin looked worse for the skin graft, not better. Mycroft knew that this was normal, that it would take time for it to heal and that when it did Sherlock would be better for it. His face would at least begin to look more like a face again, instead of a candle that had melted and reset itself. 

“I really wasn’t cheating,” Mycroft said eventually. Sherlock raised his eyebrows, clearly not believing him. “I wasn’t. My hands shake when I’m around you. Look.” And Mycroft held out his trembling hands for inspection. Nerves.

Sherlock studied him critically before nodding and resting back against his pillows. 

“Work on it,” he said, firmly. Mycroft laughed.

“I’ll try.” Mycroft returned the game board to the bed. “Rematch? We can call that last one a draw.” 

Sherlock nodded and picked up the tweezers to take his turn first.

~

As predicted, Sherlock’s hand would fare far better than his face. It healed nearly completely, all that remained to be seen were a few, longish lines across his palm. Pain did bother him occasionally, from cold weather or over use, but it was fine, it looked fine. 

Mycroft accused Sherlock one day of only taking up the violin again after his accident out of pure spite, just to prove he could. Sherlock had just smirked and drawn the bow unnecessarily harshly over un-tuned strings. 

Years and years later, while on a case, Sherlock let an old woman read his palm and she told him that his scars joined perfectly to the end of his life line, ensuring he would have a long, if eventful, life. Sherlock told her she was deluded as well as a murderer. 

But as far as things that deluded, cornered murders said to Sherlock, that was probably one of the nicest. 

~

Sherlock sat cross legged on the edge of his hospital bed, glowering at his mother. He may have only been eight and a half but he still cast a rather impressive figure of haughtiness in that moment. 

“No,” he said again, for the hundredth time that day. 

“It’s not a yes or no option,” said Mrs Holmes wearily. “You’ve been desperate to come home for weeks now.”

“I do want to come home.” Sherlock spoke slowly and carefully, taking great pains to explain something so simple. “It’s school I don’t want to go to.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, young man.” But there was no real anger in Mrs Holmes’ words. It would be a long time before she could bear to scold Sherlock properly again, which some people might say would explain an awful lot about Sherlock. “Whether you want to or not you have to go to school. It’s the law.”

“I could be home schooled.”

“By who? Me and your father both have to work and we both know you’d run circles around any tutor we hired.”

“I run circles around them at school too.” 

The corner of Mrs Holmes’ mouth twitched slightly although she tried to hide it. 

“I know. You still have to go.”

“But I already know everything.” Sherlock was becoming visibly distressed the longer this conversation progressed, the right side of his face flushed, his eyes beginning to water with angry tears. If this had have been a choice, Mrs Holmes knew she would have given in by now. 

“Not the point. You still—”

“Isaac doesn’t have to go to school!” Sherlock shouted suddenly, pointing accusingly at the boy in the bed opposite. Mrs Holmes blushed scarlet and grabbed her son’s arm, forcing it back to his side before anyone else could see and knelt in front of him to talk lower. 

“That’s because Isaac is very ill.”

“I’m ill.” Sherlock pouted.

“Yes. But you’re getting better.”

“Isn’t Isaac?”

Mrs Holmes hesitated, but then shook her head. “No, dear. He’s not,” she half whispered. Sherlock glanced at the other boy again, then back at his mother, his rage somewhat tapered by this new information. Mrs Holmes cupped the right side of Sherlock’s face in her hand. She had been going to place both hands on his face but had stopped half way with a wince, placing her left hand on his shoulder instead. 

“Now listen to me, William—”

“I’m not William, I’m Sherlock!” 

The William/Sherlock debate was an ongoing one in the Holmes household. No one was exactly sure why, a year ago, Sherlock had suddenly decided he liked his middle name better than his first, but since then it was all he would answer to the biggest part of the time. It was a mark of how desperate she was that Mrs Holmes gave in so easily this time. 

“Yes, all right, Sherlock. Whichever you prefer. The thing is, you have to go to school. I know that you know everything they’re trying to teach you. I know that you don’t like it there. You’ll be moving to the senior school in a few years time, perhaps things will be different there.” Sherlock scoffed and tried to flop back on the bed but his mother’s hands guided him back to sitting. “You have to go.”

“You heard the doctors, Mummy,” mumbled Sherlock. “They said themselves, I’ll be back in here in a few months for more surgery. More skin grafts, and they want to do something with my eye, and I’ll be coming back a lot for day treatment in the meantime anyway.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs Holmes. “All the more reason for you to go to school while you can. I’m not letting this dictate the rest of your life. I’m not letting this ruin your future.” Sherlock’s sighed, but didn’t have another response and his mother knew she had won. She stood, and pulled her son close to her chest in a tight hug. She could feel his bony shoulders shaking and when she pulled back, she saw he was crying silently. 

“There now,” she said, handing him the box of tissues from his bedside stand. “It won’t be as bad as you’re thinking, sweetheart.” She just restrained herself from adding ‘I promise’ to her words. As much as she wanted to, she knew she couldn’t promise that. 

“It’ll be worse,” Sherlock replied, his voice wavering as he continued to cry. Then he yelped and clutched at his left eye. Mrs Holmes started forwards in alarm before recalling a recent meeting she had with Sherlock’s head doctor. Although Sherlock’s sight was saved, there was damage to the tear duct. 

Mrs Holmes would have done anything to stop Sherlock from crying just then. She wanted to say all the usual, senseless platitudes that parents usually said to soothe their children’s worries. She wanted to be able to tell Sherlock with assurance that everything would be fine. She would have done so, if she didn’t know that Sherlock would see through is as an obvious lie. 

~

The staff in the children’s hospital had encouraged patient’s school friends to visit. They said it was an important part of a patient’s readjustment to normal life, as well as a distraction from hospital life. Just so long as it didn’t tire them out to much. It was also a good idea for the visiting children to be able to see the truth of their friend’s illnesses and injuries, so that they could hopefully understand better. 

Apart from his family, Sherlock did not receive a single visitor. His grandparents – his mother’s parents – did visit once but they didn’t stay long. Sherlock overheard them arguing in less-than-hushed tones with his grandmother saying “I’m sorry, Violet, I just can’t look at him.” 

There was a sharp intake of breath from his mother before she replied, icily, “How can you say that? He’s still Sherlock, my son. He’s still your grandson. This doesn’t change anything.”

“He never was the easiest child to deal with, Vi. This is just, too much.”

Sherlock’s grandparents were not invited back to see him after that. 

There was not a single child who visited Sherlock. 

The week after Sherlock’s accident, when he would still have been on suspension from school, a get well soon card was sent for him signed by his entire class. Sherlock could just picture the teacher handing it round, getting each student to write their name. It had been the same when a boy the previous year had his tonsils removed. Everyone was required to sign the card, whether or not they were actually friends with the boy. 

Sherlock did not stand up the card as the other children did with their messages from friends and family. His father found it a few days later, crumpled into a ball and shoved out of sight behind Sherlock’s bedside table. He did not need to ask what the card was doing there and he made sure it got to the bin this time.  
~

Sherlock had long held the title of ‘freak’ at school. It had nothing to do with his appearance and everything to do with him simply being himself. He did not imagine that his classmates would treat him any differently now that there was something to mark him out as different physically as well. So, the first few days back came as something of a surprise. Things were different. Not better, but different. No one called him names; no one shoved him in the corridor, or tried to start a fight with him in the playground. No one spoke to him or came near him at all. The other children treated him the way a pack of animals might treat an unknown creature suddenly appearing in their midst. They stared openly, but didn’t approach, keeping as much distance between themselves and Sherlock as possible. Even the other children on Sherlock’s table in class tried to keep away. Sherlock observed the inches between him and his neighbour’s chairs grow wider by millimetres every day while the children themselves shifted right to the edge of their seats. Whenever they needed to hand Sherlock something they did so carefully, making sure their fingers never touched. 

Sherlock did not like this new isolation better than the old open hostility he was used to but before he had a chance to dwell on it too much, things changed again. A girl called Maria Woodgrove came up to Sherlock one lunchtime. Up until then, Maria had only ever treated Sherlock with the deepest contempt – she had been responsible for tripping Sherlock down a flight of stairs on a school field trip to a museum. Sherlock was therefore quite surprised that Maria was the first student to approach him after the accident.

“I just want you to know,” Maria said, loudly and slowly, “that we all want you to get better very soon.” Maria gestured from herself to the small group of friends she had brought over with her. She was tilting her head close to Sherlock, keeping her face directly in front of his healthy right eye and over exaggerating every expression. 

“I’m not-” Sherlock meant to say how he was not going to ‘get better’. This wasn’t something like a bad bout of the flu, or a broken bone that he could simply heal from. He was not going to wake up one morning to find his face back to how it was before. He was going to tell Maria all this, explaining it so even she couldn’t be mistaken, but he never got the chance because Maria just kept right on talking.

“We want you to come with us,” she motioned over towards an empty table. “You can sit with us,” she gestured towards one of the chairs, one of her friends giggled, “and tell us all about what happened. I know we haven’t been friends before but I think we’re going to get along well now, right?”

And she tried to hug Sherlock. Sherlock had had enough. He pushed at Maria savagely, making her stumble. 

“No, Maria,” he said, copying the same loud, slow tone she had used on him. “I do not want to sit with you. I am not an animal in the zoo for you and your friends to amuse yourselves with. This scar does not make me ‘interesting’ and it doesn’t make stupid.” More people were staring now, but Sherlock couldn’t, and didn’t want to, stop. “I can see perfectly well, and my thinking is unimpaired, unlike yours.” He looked Maria up and down and couldn’t resist one final dig at her. “I am sorry you are looking for something to distract yourself with now that your parents are splitting up, but I am not it.”

Maria Woodgrove stared at him for a moment before breaking into loud and, for the most part, fake, tears. She had not told any of her friends about her parents separation yet, which Sherlock already deduced and he would ordinarily have kept this information to himself. But Maria had scraped at all his raw nerves. 

After that things at school returned very quickly to how they always had been, just as Sherlock had always known it would.

~

A supply teacher who overheard a group of children calling Sherlock ‘freak’ in the playground raised her concerns with Sherlock’s teacher. 

“It isn’t right, for them to mock him like that about his scar.”

“Oh no,” Sherlock’s teacher reassured her. “They don’t mean his face at all.” 

Nothing more was said on the subject.

So as long as it wasn’t his disfigurement the other children were mocking, apparently that was fine. 

~

A well meaning, but highly annoying aunt of Sherlock’s had once told him that he was going to be a heartbreaker when he got older. She had announced, apparently unaware of the horrendous cliché of her words, that he had the kind of eyes a girl could drown in – great blue-green pools shining against the alabaster of his skin. Mycroft had laughed so hard he felt sick and still liked to tease Sherlock with these words from time to time right up until the day of Sherlock’s accident. It didn’t seem so funny after that.

As Sherlock reached his teenage years and his features began to change, it could still be argued that his aunt had been partly right. The right hand side of Sherlock’s face sculpted and matured, his impossibly high cheekbone clear cut and distinct, his eyes still that shifting blue-green his aunt had so admired. Unlike most of the boys at his school, Sherlock chose to keep his hair slightly longer, the curls brushing against his chin. It had the benefit of hiding some of the scaring close to his scalp and, when the mood took him, Sherlock could allow it to hang further forward still, covering yet more of his face. The contrast of the darkly dramatic curls against his skin was a particular contrast that many would find attractive. 

Sherlock was not vain, but he was very aware. He was aware of the effect his looks had on other people. Frequently when he was out, somewhere away from school, where people were not already in the know about his accident, he would catch people staring. Girls, and sometimes boys, would see him from the right hand side and point him out to their friends. They would whisper behind their hands and nudge each other, or go all giggly and pathetic. Sometimes Sherlock would play it out a little, wait for the boldest of the girls to toss her hair and try to meet his gaze. Then he would turn so they could see his face full on. 

They would gasp and go silent, before hurriedly and noisily trying to make other conversation amongst themselves. It was almost comical in its predictability. 

~

Against the advice of his therapist and his doctors and his family alike, Sherlock spent an afternoon at the library researching other cases of severe facial scaring from acid burns. The images he found in medical textbooks and through internet searches on the ancient library computer should have disturbed him. Some were undoubtedly worse than Sherlock’s own injuries – flesh eaten right away to the bone, bodies with features lost to horrific lab accidents. But as far as Sherlock could tell, all of the case studies he found on that day differed from him in one key way.

Where the damage was as severe as Sherlock’s, it was highly unlikely for the scaring to be confined to one side of the face. People either seemed to have either only one or two streaks of misshapen flesh to show for their accident, or their entire faces were marred. Very few seemed to have the half and half split that Sherlock did, outside of the realm of villains in comic books and opera singing phantoms in musicals. 

Sherlock could still remember how the doctor that first night had said he was lucky. He supposed that if he were to relay his findings to anyone else they would say the same to him now. He was lucky to have escaped with only half of his face damaged, it could have been so much worse. 

But Sherlock observed the horror he could inflict simply by turning his face from one side to the other. He was filled with envy for those people who had at least done a complete job of it. At least the world didn’t treat them like they were being deliberately deceptive, just for looking the other way. 

~

Sherlock purposefully chose a university far enough away from home that reputation would not have preceded him. He could easily have gotten into Oxford or Cambridge if he put his mind to it, but he instead put his mind to going anywhere other than there. He in particular had no wish to go somewhere where the reputation that preceded him would be that of ‘Mycroft Holmes’ little brother’. Mycroft had been predictably lorded to almost saint-like heights by his professors and tutors throughout his university years and now increasingly so by his bosses in his early career as he continued to, equally predictably, shove his nose into every aspect of Sherlock’s business. Sherlock was not going to make it easy for him.

So he accepted an offer from a university which, although still frequently listed among the top fifteen in the country, came with rather less prestige. His parents told him that he was selling himself short. That suited Sherlock just fine. 

~

There were plenty of oddities amongst the student population. Students with bright blue hair and tattoos, students who wore their pyjamas to class, or who wore as little as possible. There were enough that they were not ostracized but were welcomed into the throng or else banded together to form their own little gang of freaks. 

It could have been heaven for Sherlock, if he had been prepared to be known as ‘that boy with scars’. He was not. He fell back on his old distraction tactic of deducing facts about his classmates, skipping the classes he deemed irrelevant, and excelling in those that held his attention. 

For the most part, his deductions were not met with as much open hostility as at school. Those in his halls of residence thought of Sherlock’s musings as sources of free entertainment and on the occasions when he succeeded in pissing anyone off to the point of physical violence, he made sure they went away knowing he could give as good as he got. Even if he was outmatched physically, he could still spill their secrets between blows. 

Sherlock could take punches. He didn’t let on that it was the looks and the words that got beneath his damaged skin. 

~

Sherlock was frequently reminded of how raw his injuries still looked. People still gasped when they saw him, even if they tried to pass it off as a cough or a fake sneeze. Throughout his childhood – particularly on visits to the hospital where people seemed to think it was okay to ask such questions – other adults would ask Sherlock’s parents how long ago the accident was, and would then mask their surprise as they were told it had been years ago, not weeks. 

One night Sherlock accompanied Sebastian Wilkes to the Accident and Emergency department as Sebastian had cut his hand after drunkenly locking himself out of the halls of residence and then trying to break in through a window. Sherlock had to explain on three separate occasions – to the frankly quite alarmed receptionist, to a passing nurse, and then to the doctor who eventually stitched Sebastian’s hand – that it was Sebastian and not he who needed treatment. 

Sherlock was not exactly surprised when Sebastian ignored him for a whole month after that. 

~

The first person to give Sherlock drugs was another student. They were in the same chemistry class and had both chosen the same evening to work in the lab. 

He made it sound so appealing, just something to calm Sherlock’s racing mind and shut everything out for a little while. He made everything about it seem so neat and ordered and clean. His room was tidy and he easily cleared a space for them both to sit on the floor. He showed Sherlock how to inject and helped Sherlock find a good vein and then sat with him afterwards, rubbing the exposed skin of his arms. He stayed with Sherlock throughout. He called Sherlock beautiful and kissed him all over the good side of his face, before promptly falling asleep on Sherlock’s chest.

The next morning he helped Sherlock get to the bathroom in time, and made sure he was sick neatly into the toilet. Sherlock was surprised that the boy didn’t present him with a leaflet on aftercare and explain the pros and cons of frequent drug use to him. 

Sherlock already knew all the risks, and he decided it was worth it in exchange for those few blissful, mind numbed moments before he passed out on the dorm room floor. 

~

Of course, not everyone Sherlock would meet while seeking a fix was as kind and caring as that first boy had been. 

“Christ, Ugly, what happened to you?” The man leered as though there was something amusing about his words. Sherlock ignored him and handed over the money. 

The words should have stung him, but didn’t. Not coming from this man, who had two teeth missing, and who sold drugs to college students despite being old enough to be most of their fathers. Perhaps it was the promise of the coming high that kept Sherlock quiet, or perhaps it was the refreshing honesty of the man’s words. He didn’t pretend there was nothing wrong with Sherlock to his face and then whispered behind his back. He didn’t pretend it was something other than Sherlock’s looks that he was insulting. No. This man was truthful. He looked Sherlock dead in the eye as he called him ugly.

It was the kind of honesty Sherlock only ever found in situations like this, in damp, decaying squats with mattresses on the floor the windows smashed in and boarded back up again. The honesty, the not being fucking lied to on a daily basis, appealed to Sherlock nearly as much as the drugs did. 

~

A few months later, he let the same man who called him ‘Ugly’ fuck him, because he couldn’t pay for more drugs any other way. The man gripped Sherlock’s face as he thrust into him, nails digging into scars, and called him Ugly and a dog and, that old favourite, a freak. Sherlock minded a little more that time, but still ignored it. 

~

It’s in one of those drug dens that Sherlock first discovered where his talents might truly lie. He was wondering from room to room, looking for anything to distract himself from how sick he felt. He always felt sick afterwards. He needed quite a bit more morphine than most for it to take effect, which Sherlock put down to increased immunity to painkillers, given the amount he had taken in early childhood, and it always hit him hard afterwards. 

He had a class later and he needed something, anything to distract him long enough to sober up, get his thoughts together so that he could get home and change. 

He found the newspaper lying in a pile of unopened junk mail by the front door. Sherlock sat with his back against the wall, smoking his way through three cigarettes as he read the cover story. A murder had been committed. No witnesses, police appealing for information, although they should also be worrying about the obvious leak of information to the media that had occurred, given the details in this particular report. Sherlock read and reread the case as he sat there. After class he looked up further details of the case. 

Within a day he knew who the killer was, how and when they had killed the victim and, if he was not very much mistaken he knew why too. He also knew that an aspiring journalist was sleeping with a forensic photographer in order to get her first big story. 

It was another week before the police announced they had arrested the perpetrator – the father of the ex-boyfriend, just as Sherlock had known. If any action was taken against the forensic photographer, Sherlock did not know. Frustrating on both accounts. 

 

~

Sherlock was intimately acquainted with hospitals. He knew them from sight and sound and smell, so he knew he was in one even before he opened his eyes. He could only guess as to what he was doing unexpectedly back in a hospital at the age of twenty, and he could only guess it had something to do with the large amount of drugs in his system as of last night. 

Waking fully to Mycroft’s face, somewhere between anxiety and disapproving, was enough to tell Sherlock he was right. Sherlock had overdosed. Entirely accidently, despite what others seemed to believe. 

~

Sherlock read a lot of newspapers while he was in that costly, private, all-expenses-paid-courtesy-of-Mycroft rehab facility. Reading was about the only thing the staff seemed to approve of him doing to alleviate his boredom. He read about murders and spates of burglaries and petty criminal damage. He read about victims who had fallen prey to jealous partners and over possessive parents and random strangers looking for money and he knew he could have solved every one before the police.

Sherlock read crime novels too, skipping over the side plots about the detectives home life, and love life, and disrupted childhood, to get to the next murder scene, the next interrogation room. The only ones he failed to solve were the ones so badly written that they left gaping plot holes that the author was apparently unaware of in their quest to get character a to finally kiss character b. 

~

There was something very familiar in that clinic.

The other patients, or inmates as Sherlock more accurately referred to them, were honest with him too. They were honest in the same way the addicts and dealers he was used to had been honest. It made sense, seeing as they were addicts and dealers themselves. 

The doctors and nurses were very similar to the ones Sherlock had encountered in childhood. All over happy and over worked. They admonished the other patients the in the same, still upbeat way they had on the children’s ward, when they heard them call out about Sherlock’s scar. 

Sherlock ignored them, and went back to reading his newspapers, or trailed off to see if he could trade cigarettes in exchange for an hour or so of uninterrupted time in the clinic’s IT room. He couldn’t speak for the others, but he had found something more interesting than his face to fixate upon, for now at least.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who has being leaving comments and kudos on my older fics too just lately! It all means the world to me.  
> If you feel like doing the same here, please do and I will love you forever.


End file.
